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    <title>Eggdrop Documentation: About Eggdrop</title>
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      <p><strong>About Eggdrop</strong></p>
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    <p>Eggdrop was created around December 1993 to help stop the incessant
    wars on #gayteen. It spawned from another bot that was in the process of
    being written at the time called &quot;Unrest&quot;. The purpose of
    Unrest was to answer help requests from other bots. The first public
    release was v0.6, and since then, it has grown into what you have before
    you.</p>

    <p>Eggdrop is the world&#39;s most popular Internet Relay Chat (IRC) bot;
    it is freely distributable under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
    Eggdrop is a feature rich program designed to be easily used and
    expanded upon by both novice and advanced IRC users on a variety of
    hardware and software platforms.</p>

    <p>An IRC bot is a program that sits on an IRC channel and preforms
    automated tasks while looking just like a normal user on the channel.
    Some of these functions include protecting the channel from abuse,
    allowing privileged users to gain op or voice status, logging channel
    events, providing information, hosting games, etc.</p>

    <p>One of the features that makes eggdrop stand out from other bots is
    module and Tcl scripting support. With scripts and modules, you can make
    the bot preform almost any task you want. They can do anything from
    preventing floods to greeting users and banning advertisers from
    channels.</p>

    <p>You can also link multiple Eggdrop bots together to form a botnet.
    This can allow bots to op each other securely, control floods efficiently,
    and even link channels across multiple IRC networks. It also allows the
    Eggdrops share user lists, ban lists, exempt/invite lists, and ignore
    lists with other bots if userfile sharing is enabled. This allows users
    to have the same access on every bot on your botnet. It also allows the
    bots to distribute tasks such as opping and banning users. See doc/BOTNET
    for information on setting up a botnet.</p>

    <p>Eggdrop is always being improved and adjusted because there are bugs
    to be fixed and features to be added (if the users demand  them, and they
    make actually sense). In fact, it existed for several years as v0.7 -
    v0.9 before finally going 1.0. This version of Eggdrop is part of the
    1.6 tree. A valiant effort has been made to chase down and destroy
    bugs.</p>

    <p>To use Eggdrop, you need:</p>

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      <ul>
        <li>Some sort of Unix account</li>

        <li>A pretty good knowledge of IRC and Unix, including how to
        compile programs, how to read, and what DCC chat is, at absolute
        minimum.</li>

        <li>About 5-7 MB of disk space. The eggdrop tarball is about 4.8 MB
        unpacked.</li>

        <li>Tcl -- Eggdrop cannot compile without Tcl installed on your
        shell.</li>
      </ul>
    </blockquote>

    <p>Before starting, ask yourself if you really need a bot. Most IRC
    servers allow only a handful of bots, and some forbid them outright.
    The reason? Too many people run bots as &quot;toys&quot; or as a means
    of destruction. If you want to use Eggdrop for destructive purposes, go
    ahead and erase this directory now. It&#39;s almost impossible to do
    what you want with this bot.</p>
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    <p><em>Copyright &copy; 1997 Robey Pointer<br>
     Copyright &copy; 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 <a href="http://www.eggheads.org/">
     Eggheads Development Team</a></em></p>
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